The four events that should have happened during my trip to Thailand but in the end haven’t

This blog post shouldn’t exist. The very words you are reading should have never been written. Writing about my recent trip to Thailand during the holidays wasn’t according to plan. And it wasn’t according to plan not because I didn’t want to repeat myself and publish yet another post about a trip on the other side of the world. My blog posts are not about narrating any event that happened to me anyway. They use narration as an expedient to make a point. Or at least, this is what I hope to be able to convey. The reason why I didn’t want to write a blog post about Thailand is because nothing remarkable happened there.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the trip. On the contrary I really loved the landscapes, the food and the nature. Also, I travelled with a friend and spent quality time with her and this was certainly the best part. However, the thing is that, despite choosing (again!) Viaggi e Avventure nel Mondo as a tour operator, during the trip no metaphysical breakthrough or a-ah moment occurred to me. I returned home bringing with me zero new idea. Basically, that trip around the world visiting a new culture and meeting new people did what such trip shouldn’t do: it left me completely unchanged.

Upon my return from Thailand, besides going back to work, I resumed my writing practice too. I had (and still have) an idea that I wanted to develop for months now, but just could not get myself to sit with it long enough to articulate it in writing. And it was right when I got stuck in the middle of my first Word page that this very blog post poured into the rest of the document and came to be. What you are about to read are the four events that could have happened while in Thailand and that would have made for four interesting and hilarious blog posts… but haven’t.

THE BACHELOR CONTEST AND ACCOMPANYING DRAMA

In Viaggi e Avventure nel Mondo, every trip is assigned to a coordinator. The coordinator is sort of a volunteer who, instead of paying, takes care of organizing the details of the trip (transfers, hotels, visits etc.). He is also the person who sets up the Whatsapp group chat with the participants to collect eventual ideas and preferences and let them know each other before departing. Our Whatsapp group of a total of 15 participants was created back in November and as soon as people started introducing each other, two facts immediately caught my attention and the one of my friend. First, there were only women in the group. Second, the coordinator was good looking.

It didn’t take that many neurons either to infer that, to be willing to travel alone to Thailand and spend New Year’s Eve with a group of strangers, it must have been because these women didn’t have better to do. Meaning, they were all single. And I would also add a bit frustrated and desperate. (Unlike me and my friend, who are happy and thriving, of course!) Scientific-me started making statistical queries to my friend, as if she had any clue: for how long, on average, do you think they didn’t have sex? What is the probability that they will fall in love with the coordinator and flirt with him? Do you think that there’s any chance that one of them will be successful?

A very brilliant idea for a nice blog post crossed my mind. I called my friend and begged her to please-please-please play the game and start competing against the frustrated women and get the coordinating bachelor. This way she would have helped me transform the trip into an anthropological-sociological-biological case study for my blog. To say that my friend is stunning is an understatement and so of course she would have won the hearth (and likely not only the hearth) of the coordinator without even trying too much. On the other hand, I would have played the OCD role (which I don’t need much effort to impersonate to be honest), pretended not to realize what was going on and instead observed the whole dynamic while faking to read a book. She refused, even if I made it clear that she didn’t have to get intimate with him if she didn’t want to (although that would have made the whole thing much more interesting). In the end, we agreed to at least enjoy observing the frustrated women competing against each other: there would have been enough content for a blog post anyway. Two days later even this milder anthropological blog post idea vanished miserably when the coordinator posted his first voice message in the chat. He begun shouting “Laaaaaaaadieeeeeess!” with a lot of enthusiasm and a high-pitched voice. The coordinator was, in fact, gay.

LESBIAN COUPLE WITH COUGAR FLAVOUR

“We are Paola and Chiara from Milan” was the text sent in the Whatsapp group by one of the participants. (I’m masking the real names and provenance of the two individuals for the sake of being privacy-preserving). The way this message was written without any additional information triggered the attention of my friend who commented that in her opinion Paola and Chiara were a lesbian couple. How great if that was really the case! I could have written about the lesbian couple initiating one (or multiple) desperate women into sapphic practices right in Thailand. Yes, yes, yes! What a great chance to have a true anthropological-sociological-biological study case for my blog, reinforcing the current understanding that lesbians run in packs. Just like anorexic girls.

The day of the departure finally arrived. I scanned the members of the group to check if there was really a lesbian couple. I quickly identified a woman in her early fifties with short black hair, wearing baggy black and acid green sports clothes. When she took off her sweater, a bunch of tattoos popped out here and there. She had thick black glasses and one ear covered with piercing. To remove any doubt that her style was only due to bad taste, she both walked and stood with open legs. Gotcha, there you are! However, what I wasn’t prepared for was that the woman she was hugging looked half of her age. Are cougars a thing in the lesbian world? What a leverage the older woman could have on the other lonely women! And what a kick to my study case… “Mum, can you please hold my backpack” said the younger girl 20 minutes later while we were queuing for the passport check. Ouch!

OPEN-BORDER COUPLE WITH JUICY SEXUAL LIFE

One detail that I omitted so far is that there was a second man in the group. The reader may forgive me for this omission, it’s just that I wanted to relieve him/her from the pain of processing information before it comes at hand. Now it’s the good time to write that actually, there was a couple in the group too. For the sake of practicality and anonymity, I will call them Jane and Joe. One evening, my friend, Jane and myself decided to go for dinner together and not join the others. As often happens, it in smaller groups that people open up and talk about themselves. Jane talked a lot about her relationship with Joe. How they met, what they have in common, the travels they like to do together and so on and so forth. At one random point, right when I had just put in my mouth a spoon of spicy green chicken curry, Jane said that Joe and her were not “a couple like any the other normal couple”.

At the sound of those words, my face melted, my eyes expanded and, despite the spiciness of green curry burning my throat, I could not hold a subtle grin for how much I was lit up. I stared at my friend, sitting right in front of me, who had also my same grin. Yes, we were definitely thinking of the same thing: this couple was not that average nor as plain as we thought. I was hoping, HOPING, that Jane was about to tell us that they were an open couple where everybody was having adventures on their own. Or that they had an account on Pornhub and made amateur videos and recently became stars in that world. Or that they practiced hard-core BDSM where she was the little dominant mistress and he the huge submissive dude. And that Jane would end a detailed description of their spare room turned into a dungeon by saying: “Didn’t you notice that Joe is a bit retarded? That’s because of the harsh slaps I give him all the time”. I was so excited and burnt inside due to the curry that I couldn’t breathe normally, let it alone talk. My friend collected herself just enough to be able to ask her in a calm manner: “In what sense you’re not a normal couple?”. Jane’s answer: “Joe and I don’t give each other gifts for Christmas, birthdays and Saint Valentine. We do not celebrate these things, not even our anniversary. We have been together for six and a half years, but we believe gifts are not important”.

I don’t know how we were able to hide our disappointment. Especially mine, cause another cool blog post idea disappeared faster than the delicious green curry from my plate. We went along with her, reassuring that certainly material gifts are not that important compared to love. Why would a woman want a nice cashmere pullover for Christmas, or a dinner in an elegant restaurant for Saint Valentine. Yes, plain Jane, you are right: only frivolous materialistic women desire a ring after six plus years of relationship. And nope, your average Joe is not a profound person focusing on what really matters. He’s just not that into you.

REPATRIATION THROUGH THE AID OF THE MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

One of the participants was stupid. Really stupid. For example, she couldn’t grasp the exchange rate between Euros and Bahts and in the end, she spent something like 70 Euro in a bunch of magnetos. I can’t recall the number of times she forgot or left behind things that the rest of the group helped her with. She lost the plane tickets and someone had to print them again for her. In multiple occasions, she could not find her smartphone, her beach towel, her spare bikini. One day when we were hopping from one little island to the other, she got tourist-trapped by a lady doing massages in a nice and fancy gazebo at the beach. Half an hour of Thai massage was double the price of one hour of the same massage at the low-key spa of hour hotel. She came out of the massage jumping and laughing cause her backpain disappeared, while holding hand in hand with her new “Philippine friend”. Yep, she really must have thought that we ended up in the Philippines at one point. When it was time to pay, she realized that she had probably enough money in her wallet to buy another magneto, but not to pay for the overpriced Thai massage of her new friend. Plain Jane paid the massage for her in the end.

On the last day, we visited a temple that required to climb more than a thousand steps to be reached. The peculiarity of this temple is that it is populated by a lot of little monkeys. When we came back and sat on the tables of the temple’s yard to eat and drink something, we noticed how accustomed these monkeys were with humans and how quickly they would steel unguarded food from tourists. We were all reminding each other to keep our bags with our precious passports and phones on our laps and to hold them tight. What did our retarded lady do instead? She left the bag on the ground, behind her back. A monkey quickly arrived, stole the bag and took it up to a tree. It was my friend who realized that and gave the alarm. Our brilliant lady stood up, looked at the monkey in disbelief and shouted: “Hey little bitch, give me back my bag! How come did you take my baaaaaag?”. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the bag contained only a bottle of water, which the monkey promptly threw away, and a bra, which the monkey started playing with. All the other tourists were laughing at the scene of this little beast wearing the bra as a hat, but what me and my friend wondered was why the bag didn’t contain her passport. Where was she keeping it if not with her, in the only bag she took for the visit to the temple? That will always remain a mystery to me. But more importantly: that will always be a missed opportunity to write a blog post about that time in Thailand where we had to call the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to repatriate one of us because a monkey stole her passport.

And there you have it, the four events that would have made for very interesting blog post ideas, which in the end vanished into nothing. Do you think it’s over? Nope, there is one final thought awaiting a few scrolls down, if you have one more minute to spare of course ;)

I’m struck by how little it took to write this blog post. Normally, the whole process going from early drafting, rewriting, editing, to preparation of the webpage, search of images and an appropriate quote to final polishing and publishing takes around 40-45 hours of work. This time it took about a third of the time. Is it because i suddenly became better at writing? I don’t think so. The truth is that this blog post was easier because it was about nothing. And nothingness was so pervasive that I could even chunk it down into four parts, making it sound just like any other feed that appears on my Instagram page. By the way, the typical post targeting women sounds in fact something like: “I tried the Victoria’s Secret diet for a month: here’s the five lessons I learnt”. Or “19 vegan recipes for Veganuary that you can’t miss”. Or “Eight things I wish I knew when I was 23”. Or “I tried Victoria’s Secret workout for a week and here’s the three exercises that you should do every day”. (Yep, Victoria Secret’s is often the main subjects of these posts). If you ever tried to write something, be it a cover letter, or the Master thesis, or an article, you know exactly how difficult it is to articulate ideas and get in the flow. So if you’re also experiencing the writer’s block, use the same technique that i just used. Take a step back and do like the people writing the hundreds of posts polluting your Instagram feed do: choose to write about nothing, wrap it up by emptiness floating in the void, break it down into at least three chunks, decorate it with a few catchy images and click on “publish”. You’ll be amazed by how quickly tons of words will pour into your blank page when you write about nothing. Well, maybe that’s the point I wanted to make ;)

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The four events that should have happened during my trip to Thailand but in the end haven’t

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